The theme for the new release of Kourier Integrator for U2 is "U2 to SQL Made Easier" and focuses on streamlining the process of creating a SQL data warehouse from a U2 database while making it even faster and easier than before.

Supporting this mantra is the new data warehouse Quick Start Workbench, which encapsulates the features and workflow in a easy-to-use interface. Users can select and analyze files, review data profiling information, revise file schema, and then generate all of the related data exports, services, SQL DDL and SSIS packages necessary to build and maintain a normalized SQL data warehouse.

"The theme is important because many of our new clients are experts in U2 but they don't know much about SQL Server," says Keith Lambert, vice president for marketing and business development at Kore.

"An integral part of the Quick Start tools is the ability to profile data," notes Mark Dobransky, co-founder and managing partner of Kore. The process of profiling data allows customers to hone in on the data gems in their application files. "Using the Quick Start and data profiling tools creates a better data warehouse, which leads to more actionable business intelligence reports and dashboards."

Kore's application-specific operational data stores (which are prebuilt data warehouses) are now available for Activant Eclipse, Activant Prelude, and Datatel Colleague. "In today's economy, it is all about purchasing software and getting return on investment that is now typically measured in months not years," Dobransky emphasizes. "We will also expand on this list as we go forward," adds Lambert.

Kore also now has full 64-bit support in Release 3.0 of Kourier Integrator for U2. "We have gone through all of our code to make sure it is 64-bit compliant," says Dobransky. "The reason to do that is to keep up with hardware improvements and to take advantage of the increased memory capacity which translates into more speed."

In addition, a new optional feature called Unified Scheduling allows users who are most proficient in U2 to extract data out of U2 and then automatically load it into the SQL Server data warehouse using a single process. However, customers who are more proficient in SQL Server and have more advanced requirements can still control the loading of data using SQL Server Agent, points out Dobransky.